All is Wild on the Western Front
by Tippy.LaRoux
Summary: A collection of stories taking place in the mid 1800’s American West. When Barty Jr. is caught red handed with his friends, what will his dad do? When his mother is dying, what lengths will the family go to to reunite mother and son. Ginny is hot on the trail of her husbands murderer.
1. chapter 1

This is a US Western Muggle AU - taking place sometime in the mid-1800s

 **Houses Challange**

Hufflepuff- Year 2 - Drabble

Word Count [200-750] - Actual per Google Docs 750

Additional Requirement: Family

Prompt: [Object] Nail File

 **Hogwarts Challenges and Assignments** Ravenclaw

Ancient Runes: Runic Numbers

Task 4 - Write about someone finding out they don't have long to live

Extra Credit: main character: Barty Crouch Jr.

xXx

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Crouch, but that was the last resort. There isn't anything else I can do..." She stared straight ahead, as the rest of his words blended into one. _Death_. She had felt its grasping hands reach out to her for a while, but had always been unwilling to concede defeat.

When it was clear he could do nothing more, the doctor was shown the door—wished safe travels and sent on his way. Afterward, Barty stayed by his beloved's side.

"I'm tired," she looked into Barty's eyes, and saw the fear that lay just beneath the surface. "I have to see my son one last time." A choking cough ravaged her entire body, her porcelain skin flushed with the effort, and bright red blood was wiped away as discreetly as possible.

Barty turned away from the sight, his heart breaking for his wife. Barty Jr. had been incarcerated for the last two years. In the beginning, Eloise was able to go with her husband to visit their son. It had been nearly a year since she had felt well enough to join her husband on the journey.

"Darling, he will be released in six months. You will see him just as soon as he gets out." Barty knew the letters were not enough, she wanted to hold her only boy in her arms. "I will go to the jailhouse tomorrow to see him so your mind can be at ease."

Eloise's eyes sparkled in the candlelight, and it took Barty's breath away. She looked like the girl he fell in love with years ago; before the hardships of life in the West, the stress of raising a willful boy to manhood, and the ravages of the consumption that strangled her every breath. "Will you take him something for me?"

Eloise leaned over and opened a small drawer in her bedside table. Shifting trinkets and letters around, her hand closed around a nail file she kept there. She may have been dying, but that was no reason to have chipped or broken fingernails.

"Please get this to him. Tell him I need to see him again." She pleaded with her husband and pressed the nail file into his hands

"I will do anything for you, my love."

xXx

Barty Crouch Jr. watched in amusement as his father walked into the small jailhouse. He normally came to visit on Sundays after church and exchanged letters Eloise had written the week before. The letters from his mother were the only things that got him through some days. More recently, though, the letters had been in his father's tidy handwriting, and not his mother's elegant script.

He didn't, however, normally bring a large cake covered in creamy white icing and what appeared to be daisies with cheery yellow centers. His father had always been the pillar of stodginess, so to watch him balance the fluffy confection, as he signed himself in, was quite comical indeed.

"Good afternoon, Father. I'd shake your hand, but it seems to be otherwise occupied." Barty Jr. smirked up from the scarred meeting table he had been sitting at, waiting for his father to arrive.

"How is Mom doing?" he asked, deliberately skirting around the elephant, or rather giant cake, in the room. "Here, I have another letter for you to take back to her." Barty slid the folded letter across to his father and watched as he tucked it discreetly into his breast pocket.

"Son, she's—she wanted me to bring this to you, so you may celebrate one more time with her, even if it is from afar." The look in his father's eyes was somehow full of both sorrow, and excitement. "She doesn't want you to share it with anybody, she made it special for her boy."

Shaking hands with his father after visiting hours had ended, Barty Jr. walked back to his cell carrying the cake in front of himself. That moment may have been the only time something as cheerful as the daisy covered cake traveled the halls of the jailhouse.

Later that night, after reading the letter his mother had written him to accompany the cake, Barty Jr. cut into it. Finally, in the third piece he found the nail file his mother had baked into it for him. After two nights of filing through the bars, he was finally able to break free. It was worth everything he was risking to hug his mother one last time.

He would do anything for her.


	2. Prelude

This is a US Western AU - taking place sometime in the mid-1800s

Houses Challenge

Hufflepuff- Year 2 - Short

Word Count [1500-3000] - Actual per Google Docs 1607

Additional Requirement: 3rd Person

Prompt: [Action] Betraying someone's trust

* * *

"All rise for the honorable, Judge Crouch," bellowed a stoic bailiff standing in front of the dias. The murmurs that began running throughout the courtroom when the defendants were brought in came to an abrupt halt.

Barty Crouch Sr. walked into the courtroom and stood behind the bench until one could hear a pin drop in the back row. His dark eyes swept the courtroom noting all in attendance. His black robes were the only thing softening his appearance – which was overwhelmingly severe. From his beard that looked to have been trimmed using a ruler and shaped to a knife edge, to the ramrod straight posture.

He saw her in the back of the courtroom. His wife, Eloise Crouch, had defied him and come to that day. He demanded she stay home, to spare her the anguish of watching as he sentenced their only son to a lifetime behind bars. There was no 'maybe' in Bartemius Crouch's conviction. Heinous crimes were committed by the group of miscreants in front of him, and they would pay for them at the fullest extent the law would allow.

" _What are you going to do?"_ _she had asked him earlier that morning._

" _I'm gonna do the best I can!"_ _he exclaimed, upset where this conversation was headed. Frustration evident in his shortness with her. "I am going to do what is right."_

 _Eloise all but glared at Barty Sr. His response elicited a response with an intensity he had never seen from her before._

"You better remember that when our son is standing before you. He is just a boy who got wrapped up in something stupid and reckless."

 _Her porcelain face was glowing pink with the exertion until she was stopped entirely by a hacking cough that reduces her to a puddle on the floor. He bent over and pulled her gently to her feet. His crisp white handkerchief appeared in his hand and he quickly wiped away the red spittle that collected at the corner of her mouth._

 _"Armed robbery and murder are not things you do when being stupid and reckless," he offered her softly. "We raised him better than that, Eli."_

His conviction was stronger now more than ever. Which it needed to be, if he was going to do what needed to be done. He needed to sentence his son, and a few of his friends, to prison for heinous crimes committed. His wife had spent the last few weeks attempting to defend their son to everyone she saw, including him. Unfortunately, once the evidence was laid out in front of Judge Crouch, it was clear on the judgement he had to make. Based on the evidence, the most damning of which was a letter that had been penned by Barty Jr. to one of the victims right before the incident, they will all get the punishment they deserved.

Looking directly at the faces in front of him, Judge Crouch was surprised that, as he stood to release the verdict, they were just as blank as when they walked into the courtroom. He had presided over many cases, and there was something he could always see on the faces of the accused, sometimes even smell it on the air: fear. These people, one of which he was responsible for creating, were not concerned.

Eloise waited until her husband took off in the wagon earlier that morning before putting on her traveling cloak and heading out to the barn to saddle up her favorite mare, Daisy, to take her into town. Today would mark the end of the trial of the 'Fearsome Four' as her son and three of his friends had become well known as. They were accused of the capture and torture of Frank and Alice Longbottom. A lovely pair who ran the apothecary in town. When the couple went missing, the local sheriff had searched their residence for any clues to their whereabouts.

When the time for their trial came around and no other judge in the area was willing to come to their town that had been overrun by outlaws the last few years, her husband vowed to take the case and deliver nothing but swift justice to the group found to be responsible. This was before any evidence came to light, and once it did, Barty Sr. did not relinquish control of the case. He encouraged the entire town to become involved in just in case they believed him to be biassed. He wanted them all there to see that he was not afraid of putting his son away, he was dedicated to seeing justice served.

Eloise walked into the courtroom, her rail thin frame barely making a ripple, and took a seat in the back corner that had been hers since the trial began. She couldn't help but focus on the back of her son's head. Thinking back on the memories to the day she held him in her arms for the first time, to all those times he skinned a knee and required a magical kiss from his mother. How she helped him learn to write, and how to tie his shoes. What Judge Crouch didn't understand, what he could never understand, was that she would do anything for her only son. Even if it meant sitting in the back of a dusty makeshift courtroom to watch as her husband sentenced him to a life in prison. No matter the consequence she was going to face when she got home, she was going to see her baby boy free for one last time. Thinking back to the day her son left their house she began to get anxious, just wanting this entire ordeal to be over.

" _Stop talking to me like I'm a child!_ " _he yelled at his father. They hadn't ever gotten along, but once Barty Jr. began spending time with the Lestrange couple things had gone from bad to worse. Her son gave one last scathing look at her, "You are just as bad as he is, you know? Standing there and doing nothing while he attempts to control us all! I cannot abide this any longer. I'm sorry, Mother, but I will not be here to absorb this abuse, I am going out on my own. Good-bye!"_

 _After her son left, she rounded on her husband. "This is your fault! You never took the time to help him grow up and become a man. You have always been too busy making sure the world sees you as the perfect Judge. Someone who can make the right decision without hesitation." Before she finished, she was ravaged by a fit of coughing._

" _You want him to come back?_ " _he asked Eloise. "Into this house? After everything he's done?" Barty shook his head at his wife._

" _Don't do this to me, Barty. Don't make me choose between the man I married and the boy I made. Don't push him away; he is my boy and I need him with me." Ever since they moved to the dry air of the desert she had gotten much better. But, that benefit seemed to be diminishing each day. The consumption that pushed them out to the west followed her over the Mississippi and was now relinquishing control of her lungs._

The memories were coming back to her as she watched her husband deliver a verdict she was sure he felt he needed to bring down on his son. Guilty. Silent tears ran down her face as she watched her only child gnash his teeth at the bailiff who was attempting to put the 'Fearsome Four' back into their shackles to lead them back to the jailhouse.

There was no outrage in the courtroom when Judge Crouch released his sentencing on the small group in front of him. The mother of one of the victims sat behind the row of outlaws – she was in her Sunday's best with her cinnamon colored hair twisted elegantly at the nape of her neck, while they sat there – grimy after weeks of not bathing and clothes that were a strong wind away from being rags. Refusing to be viewed as a survivor, she stared defiantly ahead towards Crouch Sr. entered into official court record that the defendants in the case: Bartemius Crouch Jr., Bellatrix Lestrange, Rodolphus Lestrange, and Rabastan Lestrange, were found guilty of aggravated assault, armed robbery, and murder. They were sentenced to life behind bars.

The only person in the courtroom that day who was surprised was Judge Crouch. After the verdict was proclaimed, he watched as his wife slowly crumpled to the floor in the back of the courtroom. He stood and watched with feigned indifference as the mother who was sitting in the front row, Mrs. Augusta Longbottom stopped at the end of the aisle and saw the frail woman grasping to the pew in front of her. The sobs wacking the smaller woman's body were staccato, punctuated by her grasping at her diaphragm as though willing her body to allow more air in.

The larger woman turned continue walking out of the courtroom when the glassy eyes of Eloise Crouch met hers.

"I'm sorry," the frail woman whispered, her voice was raspy from the effort of coughing, and in her hand she held a black handkerchief, to camouflage the blood that so frequently covered it now.

"I'm not," the woman hissed back, not daring to meet the eyes of the other woman. The woman—that could see her child again tomorrow, and who wouldn't have to, one day soon, explain to her grandchild where his parents were—did not deserve her sympathy.

* * *

AN: Hogwarts Challenges and Assignments - Ravenclaw

Foreign Exchange: Task 2 : Write about the differences between two people

WC:

Character Appreciation: RB 6 (word) Defend

Disney : Dialogs #3 - "What are you going to do?" / "I'm gonna do the best I can!"

Cookie's : #10 - Write about someone strong.

Book Club: Stan - (word) survivor / (dialogue) "You want him to come back" / (word) outrage

Showtime: #3 - 666 - (word) consequence

Ambers Attic: #5 - CArrie - (word) punishment

Buttons: C4 - Barty Crouch Jr. / W#5 - (word) Fear

Lyric Alley - #11 - What the hell am I doing here?

Ami's Audio Admirations - #6 - Write about a weird family

Sophie's Shelf - #20 - "Stop talking to me like I'm a child!"

Em's Emporium - #9 - relationship - mother and child

Lo's Lowdown - Overarching Prompt s s#1: theme - family

Holmes: Prologue - (word) memories

Ambers Costume Party : #16 - Marge Simpson (mother and child relationship) / #118 Skeletal Gloves (Barty Crouch Sr.)

Days of the year: October 5th - Canon professor (Barty crouch Jr. was a professor at HW fourth year-even though he was impersonating Mad Eye)

Seasonal Colors: cinnamon

Audrey's desert challenge: Toppings - (genre) Family


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